Tag Archives: Trend

At the beginning when Macromedia came up with Flash it was quite a buzz and as a website creator I fell onto the bandwagon as well. But within months I realized it’s not worth the effort. Mid-way through Flash popularity I ditched Flash altogether and simply used more traditional ways to create websites. 10 years later nothing has changed for me, I still do not use Flash for any of my website creations.

So in a sense like most people the only thing Flash related on my computer is the infamous Adobe Flash application, you know the one that makes you play videos or play Flash based games and many more little things made with Flash. This is the Flash I am now talking about and telling you that I am fed-up with.
I decided that flash must go because I have a very stable computer and Flash applications consist of the great majority of crashes. And it’s not like the constant Flash updates do anything good as they patch little and are mostly security related and often introduce other problems. It just doesn’t end and after all these years, from Macromedia to now Adobe we clearly realize there is no real interest making Flash truly better, just take their archaic update system as example.

I install Flash because there are many sites running it and are legitimate websites, so instead of seeing a broken site I install Flash and see it correctly. But, as the years go by there are less websites using Flash thus the necessity of Flash being installed has become avoidable to the point today I decided to no longer use Flash.

I am not the only one to remove Flash from their computer as you can see for yourself at w3techs.com development of Flash websites is dropping year after year making Flash less relevant for client side.
Here’s the latest trend: http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all

You as well should shut off Flash, at least try to only turn it on when you absolutely need it and this will happen but at least it’s out of the way for most of the time. Turning it off often makes statistics get worse for Flash usage and maybe get Adobe to react.

There are many plugins for your particular web browser enabling you to see and do many things without Flash where otherwise you wouldn’t be able to. Just check out your browser plugin section for a flash alternative app and find one that is used by a lot of people with good ratings.

And if you are a developer, think twice before using that junk magnet. The link below in this paragraph points to an article still relevant about Flash. In fact when first posted in 2007 the title was “7 Top Problems using Flash” (my bookmark still reads that) and over the years they added one more negative element thus making it even more interesting, so you should at least try to understand why there are now “8 reasons to avoid Flash (or Silverlight) like the plague when designing a website“